It's easy (1) to fall in love with a new word/concept and over-use it, not see its gaps. That is the stage I will be in or the next however-long around "hyper-politics" "the Tories embraced a phase of what the political theorist Anton Jäger terms ‘hyper-politics’, in which politics is ubiquitous and absurd, touching on... Continue Reading →
Of AI, jail-breaks and Yes Minister
Hannah Murphy's FT piece- "Hackers manipulate large language models in effort to highlight flaws" - was fascinating. This bit leapt out Anthropic published research in April on a technique called “many-shot jailbreaking”, whereby hackers can prime an LLM by showing it a long list of questions and answers, encouraging it to then answer a harmful... Continue Reading →
Zombie repertoires, lowest common denominators and Beasts of England…
Sigh. What can you do (non-rhetorical question). Three hundred and fifty organisations beg everyone to come to a march in London. "Thousands" (presumably a few tens of thousand?) do. Reminds me so much of the 2009 climate march catastrophe, the "Big Wank" or "the Big Naive" or whatever it was called ("the Wave", btw). It... Continue Reading →
The absence of R/reform: a personal take on the election hustings in Stone
About a hundred people (1) gathered last night to hear from five people who want to be the Member of Parliament representing Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge . The five present were Dannie Braine, Green Party Alexander Bramham, Social Democratic Party Jacqueline Anne Brown Labour Sam Harper-Wallis Liberal Democrat Gavin Williamson, Conservative and Unionist Party [I... Continue Reading →
“You don’t know what hard work is like”: pre-Internet writing and collaboration
Quick post because am supposed to be doing other things, which scare me and I am (obviously) doing displacement activities, albeit Worthy Ones. We people who have spent most of our lives in/of the Internet (and full disclosure, I am 50:50) have no real understanding of just how much boring physical work went in to... Continue Reading →
Dead rats, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Trump – #canalyomp
I said to myself I'd at least blog every long yomp, if not all the podcasts I listened to. You would think I'd know myself better by now. But how else ya gonna get outa bed if you aren't riddled with self-delusion? Yesterday I left the house at about 0940. I was wearing a weighted... Continue Reading →
How the smugosphere defends itself, a worked example
What do the good guys do when their failure to win is pointed out to them? That’s the question I grapple with (or gum on, toothlessly) in this post (usual disclaimers apply). Readers of a nervous disposition, who are happy in their own public smugosphere, will want to look away now. I recently talked to... Continue Reading →
Raging against those who rage against the machine. On Chomsky, Michael Mosley, book festival sponsorships, and climate
Quick half-formed (but hopefully not half-baked) thoughts. The last post I put up on this site was a photo of a wonderful letter Noam Chomsky wrote to me in 1995, in reply to a "how do you keep your hope alive?" plea. It got a lot of traction on Twitter, with lots of likes and... Continue Reading →
Noam Chomsky letter from May 1995
Noam Chomsky is 95, and according to a tweet I just saw, his health "has deteriorated to the point it now prevents him from writing, commenting or participating in the public domain." I put this letter from him up as one miniscule example of just how wonderful -and life-changing - his work (the lectures and... Continue Reading →
Climate, Rishi’s D-day, the Borg and Brexit (no, really)
First things first. If in five years' time anyone thinks that what is aerating everyone today will be remembered as significant, I will eat my hat (1). I think part of our (my) fascination with what is unfolding is only in part a "they cannot be that incompetent, can they?" reaction (2): it is more... Continue Reading →
marchudson.net 